Month: June 2018

President Donald Trump appears to have heard the applause he received for pardoning Alice Johnson, the 63-year-old who served more than two decades in prison for a nonviolent drug offense before Trump commuted her life sentence this week.

Now Trump says he wants to issue more pardons—not just for politically aligned celebrities but for real people who have been unfairly imprisoned. And he says he wants input from players in the National Football League who have been protesting the national anthem. Yes, really.

“I am going to ask them to recommend to me people that were unfairly treated” by the justice system, Trump said to reporters outside the White House this morning. “And I am going to take a look at those applications.”

If those people have been unfairly treated by the system, Trump said, his administration would seek to “pardon them, or at least let them out.” He said the offer was an opportunity for the national anthem protests to be more than just talk.

It’s worth noting that the anthem protests began two years ago as a way to raise public awareness about innocent African Americans killed by cops. That’s something that even the mighty power of the presidential pardon can’t fix.

Whether Trump’s offer helps reduce tensions between the president and professional football players has yet to be seen. It’s also somewhat beside the point. If it opens a dialogue, great. The more important development here is Trump’s apparent willingness to embrace the presidential pardon as the ultimate check on America’s runaway incarceration problem (even though the president has, at other times, embraced ideas that cut the other way).

Even without input from NFL players, Trump will likely be issuing more pardons in the near future. The administration has prepared the pardoning paperwork for at least 30 people, CNN reported Wednesday.

“There will be more pardons,” Trump said Friday morning. Specifically, Trump said he was considering a pardon for the late boxer Muhammad Ali—who already had his conviction for draft evasion overturned by the Supreme Court—along with “some others, some folks who have sentences that are unfair.”

“We hope the president acts boldly here,” says Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

Ring praised Trump for doing the right thing by commuting Johnson’s sentence. “There are thousands of others who received excessive sentences, who pose no threat to public safety any longer, and deserve the same chance to rejoin their families and resume their lives,” he tells Reason.

Trump has spent most of his first year and a half in office being frustrated by the limits of presidential power. Even though the modern presidency is far more powerful than the Constitution appears to allow, Trump has learned repeatedly that his word isn’t always law. Executive orders can be held up in court, repealing Obamacare or overhauling the tax code requires congressional assent, and shifting trade policy requires investigations, reports, and hearings. For all the ink that has been spilled about Trump upending the rule of law, the systems designed to check presidential ambitions (at least the ones that Congress hasn’t deliberately kneecapped over the years) still work pretty well.

But the power of the pardon is different. It’s a virtually unchecked—and completely constitutional—tool of the presidency. Trump can wield it pretty much however he chooses, as he seems to be figuring out. (For now, let’s set aside the question of whether Trump has the authority to pardon himself, something he reiterated this morning that he thinks he has the authority to do.)

“The pardons are a very positive things for a president,” Trump said Friday. “The power to pardon is a beautiful thing.”

Already, the media is thick with conspiracy theories about Trump’s sudden interest in the power of the pardon. Maybe Trump is doing this to create a better case for pardoning anyone caught up in Robert Mueller’s investigation. Maybe he’s doing this to impress Kim Kardashian. Maybe he’s doing it to piss off Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

I don’t know. And I’m willing to bet that if the name of one of your loved ones was on the list Trump says he’s reviewing, you wouldn’t care.

These days, it’s accepted wisdom that—after 20 years of political and demographic changes—California is a one-party state and that Republicans can do well only in a narrowing group of legislative and local races. New figures show that Republicans now trail independents in the registration game, which has got to hurt the party’s image. And, most strikingly, the GOP has a tough time fielding top-tier candidates to run for the plum governor’s spot.

California did have a two-term Republican governor named Arnold Schwarzenegger, who preceded Jerry Brown’s return to power in 2011. That was fewer than eight years ago, although Schwarzenegger was an outlier—a moderate Republican movie star who won a free-for-all election after a bizarre recall of a sitting governor. Even then, however, it was already an accepted belief that the GOP needed big-name celebrity candidates to have a shot any more.

This year, ironically, it’s a buttoned-down, little-known businessman named John Cox who is shaking up the race in a relatively new “top two” system that had everyone fighting for the second spot. (The top two vote-getters in the June primary face off in the November general election, regardless of their party affiliation.) Cox surged past former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and on Tuesday and gained the right to challenge Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, despite massive spending on attack ads by a Super PAC funded by Villaraigosa backers. Newsom had 33 percent of the vote, with Cox gaining 26 percent. Villaraigosa was in third with less than 14 percent.

Stephen Greenhut sat down with Cox this week to ask whether the Republican has a hope of winning the governorship this year.

Read the whole thing here.

Anthony Bourdain, host of the food and travel shows Parts Unknown and No Reservations, author of the imminently readable memoir Kitchen Confidential, and friend of this magazine, was found dead of an apparent suicide Friday in a hotel room in France. He was 61.

The reactions on social media seem—for now, at least—to be universally sorrowful, which speaks to the joy and intensity and courage he exuded as an ambassador for both American brashness and a unique kind of culinary cultural relativism.

He was a proponent of peace and free exchange who used his platform to redirect America’s attention to the places we ravaged and then forgot about. He loved Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; he despised Henry Kissinger.

Bourdain was also a friend of liberty at home and, in his later years, an increasingly empathetic person. In an interview he gave to Reason shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, he expressed not just displeasure with the outcome but compassion for people who felt Trump could save them from something:

When people are afraid and feel that their government has failed them they do things that seem completely mad and unreasonable to those of who are perhaps under less pressure. As unhappy and surprised as I am with the outcome, I’m empathetic to the forces that push people towards what I see as an ultimately self-destructive act. Berlusconi, Putin, Duterte, the world is filled with bad choices, made in pressured times.

In that same interview he gave a nuanced response to the animal rights activists who have chided him for his nonjudgmental approach to cultures where animals are treated poorly:

One thing I constantly found in my travels, which is ignored by animal activism, is that where people live close to the edge, they are struggling to feed their families, and are living under all varieties of pressures that are largely unknown to these activists personally. Where people are suffering, animals who live in their orbit are suffering terribly. In cultures where people don’t have the luxury of considering the feelings of a chicken, they tend to treat them rather poorly. Dogs do not live good lives in countries where people are starving and oppressed. Maybe if we spent a little of [our] attention on how humans live, I think as a consequence many of these people would have the luxury to think beyond their immediate needs, like water to drink and wash, and food to live. A little more empathy for human beings to balance out this overweening concern for puppies would be a more moral and effective strategy.

In the last year, he became a staunch supporter of women who have survived sexual assault and harassment, not because he’s a saint but because he “met one extraordinary woman with an extraordinary and painful story, who introduced [him] to a lot of other women with extraordinary stories and suddenly it was personal.” His alignment with the #MeToo movement came with a healthy dose of public regret about the times throughout his career in which he turned a blind eye to female friends and coworkers who were mistreated by men in the food industry.

He also believed in the First Amendment, regardless of what the speaker had to say. “I support your inalienable right to say really stupid, offensive shit and believe really stupid, offensive shit that I don’t agree with,” Bourdain said when Boston Mayor Tom Menino pledged to ban Chik-fil-A from his city because company president Dan Cathy opposed same-sex marriage. “I support that [right], and I might even eat your chicken sandwich.”

He despised food nannies, telling Reason contributor Baylen Linnekin in 2006 that Chicago’s foie gras ban was a waste of concern. “You know, we’re force-feeding people in Guantanamo Bay and there are people worrying that we’re feeding a duck too much?” (Check out our Bourdain archives here.)

In 2007, he spoke with Reason.tv about the government’s efforts to “infantilize” consumers via food regulations and his “libertarian instincts.”

Bourdain also praised the immigrant work ethic—another reason it is so devastating to lose him now. In 2000’s Kitchen Confidential, he wrote about the essential role immigrants have played in the evolution of America’s food scene and how America has benefited by providing opportunities to people fleeing war and poverty. The “exile” class of line cooks—”Refugees, usually emigres and immigrants for whom cooking is preferable to death squads, poverty or working in a sneaker factory for two dollars a day”—were some of his favorite characters in the kitchen. He even preferred them to culinary masterminds:

When a job applicant starts telling me how Pacific Rim cuisine turns him on and inspires him, I see trouble coming. Send me another Mexican dishwasher anytime. I can teach him to cook. I can’t teach character. Show up at work on time six months in a row and we’ll talk about red curry paste and lemongrass. Until then, I have four words for you: “Shut the fuck up.”

There’s so much more to say about Bourdain’s legacy, but I think I’m going to heed his advice. He never was one for self-aggrandizement.

A 75-year-old woman who needs a cane to get around was jailed in Marietta, Georgia, this week for threatening to report a code enforcement officer to his superiors.

At least that’s what Gloria Walker told WSB-TV’s Matt Johnson. Marietta Police Department Officer Chuck McPhilamy has a different perspective: He claims that Walker was making “terroristic threats.” That’s what she’s been charged with—making terroristic threats.

“Certainly, we aren’t looking to charge someone who is 75 years old who is reaching out for help,” McPhilamy told Johnson, “but it’s also a day and age where we can’t simply ignore someone making threats.”

The dispute between Walker and the code enforcement officer occurred on May 29. Walker, who says she calls code enforcement a lot to complain about her neighbors, got into an argument with the man and said, “I’m getting someone to get you.”

Here’s Walker to Channel 2:

“He said he was an ex-police officer,” Walker told Channel 2 Action News. “I would be stupid to say anything terroristic against an ex-police officer.”

“I said, ‘I told you I’m going to take care of that little matter,'” she said. “And he said, ‘Are you threatening me?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not threatening you. You threaten me all the time.'”

Walker sounds like a cantankerous pain in the ass, and people who narc on their neighbors to code enforcement are often crummy neighbors themselves. But between Walker’s description of events, the police department’s tepid defense of the charges, and the pictures and footage that WSB-TV published, arresting Walker—to say nothing of charging her with terroristic threats—was an abuse of power and a waste of resources.

So she calls code enforcement too often? Put her number on a list and tell dispatchers to wave her off. So she gave a code enforcement officer guff? Let her call his supervisor. The department clearly knows she’s abusing the system. But putting an elderly hobbled woman in jail for being a cranky nuisance is obscene. Did she have a history of affiliating with terrorists or making terroristic threats? What evidence, exactly, does the Marietta Police Department have that shows Walker poses a danger to anyone? My guess is none, because if they had even a shred beyond her cryptic remark—which Walker denies making—we’d have heard it about it by now.

This looks like is a textbook case of trying to teach someone a lesson. Walker likes to push city employees around? Let’s show her the inside of a jail cell and see if that fixes her attitude. Maybe the city plans to ask a judge to put Walker on probation, and to make a prohibition on calling code enforcement be one of her conditions. (If a judge can order an adult defendant to stop smoking cigarettes, surely they can ban calling a city office.)

Regardless of what the city plans to do—I’ll be shocked if they don’t drop the charges before the case goes to court—this is an irresponsible use of police power that suggests a lack of patience and maturity on the part of city employees. You could say the same thing about Walker’s incessant complaining, but she doesn’t have the power to throw people in a police cruiser, haul them to jail, make them post bail, and publish their mugshots online. The standards for the government are and should be higher.

One of the most notable things about Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion this week in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission is the fact that it denied everybody what they wanted most.

Masterpiece Cakeshop owner and operator Jack Phillips wanted the Court to say that his right to religious liberty prevents the state from compelling him to create same-sex wedding cakes, since that would force him to violate his deeply held religious beliefs. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission wanted the Court to make clear that Phillips’ argument for religious liberty cannot and indeed must not trump the state’s anti-discrimination laws. If Phillips wants to sell wedding cakes, the state maintained, he must sell them to all comers regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation.

Kennedy’s opinion said none of those things. Here is what it did say:

The Court’s precedents make clear that the baker, in his capacity as the owner of a business serving the public, might have his right to the free exercise of religion limited by generally applicable laws. Still, the delicate question of when the free exercise of religion must yield to an otherwise valid exercise of state power needed to be determined in an adjudication in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself would not be a factor in the balance that the State sought to reach. That requirement, however, was not met here. When the Colorado Civil Rights Commission decided this case, it did not do so with the religious neutrality that the Constitution requires.

Translation: Phillips won, but he did not come anywhere close to winning on the principal legal argument that he advanced. What is more, Phillips’ principal legal argument might well lose in a future version of the case (or then again it might not) so long as the government’s proceedings against him manage to avoid the taint of anti-religious bias. The real fight has been postponed until an unknown later date.

This result has left both sides feeling disappointed. But here’s the thing about that: Disappointing everybody is a classic Kennedy move. Indeed, it’s one of the hallmarks of his jurisprudence. Over the years, Kennedy has managed to dash the hopes and dreams of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike.

Consider his rulings on abortion.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Kennedy famously co-authored the plurality opinion that is widely credited with saving Roe v. Wade (1973) from being overturned. Casey both reaffirmed that abortion is a fundamental right and held that government regulations may not “impose an undue burden on the right.”

Abortion rights advocates cheered that ruling and gave kudos to Kennedy. Yet in 2007 those same advocates were left reeling by Kennedy’s majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act signed by President George W. Bush. They felt like Kennedy betrayed them.

Anti-abortion advocates were of course pleased by the result in Carhart, though they too felt the Kennedy sting. That’s because Carhart reaffirmed the central holding of Casey. As Kennedy declared in his Carhart ruling, the government may not impose “an undue burden, which exists if a regulation’s ‘purpose or effect is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.'” Kennedy disheartened the anti-abortion forces even as he handed them a victory.

As for libertarians, Kennedy’s tie-breaking fifth vote in favor of eminent domain in Kelo v. City of New London still rankles. “The most frustrating justice for us was Kennedy,” Institute for Justice lawyer Scott Bullock told me. Bullock represented Susette Kelo and the other property owners in their fight against the government land grab. “I felt like I was just not making any progress with him during the [oral] argument, and he just did not seem to be really troubled by this.”

Bullock expected Kennedy to be more receptive because Kennedy’s previous jurisprudence had been generally hawkish in defense of property rights. In United States v. James Daniel Good Real Prop. (1993), for example, Kennedy had declared, “individual freedom finds tangible expression in property rights.” But that version of Kennedy was totally AWOL from Kelo. As far as libertarians were concerned, Kennedy stabbed them in the back.

So Masterpiece Cakeshop is hardly the first time that Justice Kennedy has managed to disappoint everybody. The question is whether it will be the last time. Rumors of Kennedy’s retirement are currently circulating around Washington. Should he step down later this month, Masterpiece Cakeshop would be one of his final opinions. As a swan song for his mercurial career on the bench, Kennedy could do worse.